UW wins national award for LEAN implementation

It was announced this week that the University of Washington is one of two winners of the 2013 National Consortium for Continuous Improvement in Higher Education (NCCI) “Leveraging Excellence Award.”

The award recognizes best practices that have had broad impact within the higher education community.

In a statement from NCCI, the group details UW’s Finance and Facilities implementation of LEAN on campus:

Since January 2010, Finance & Facilities (F2) has deployed process improvement extensively, using Lean across all units in its 1,350-employee organization. Complementary goals of high employee engagement and dramatic performance gains have netted an over-400-percent return on investment, and over 12,000 employee ideas.

Lean Value-Stream Mapping, popularized as a sort of project-management launch techniques, is actually the entry-point to learning a work way-of-life at F2, where clear goals, visual management, idea systems, and daily huddles are simultaneously improving performance and team dynamics.

The award will be presented at the NCCI annual meeting in Indianapolis in July.